


Criterion A

by CactusWren



Series: Finger Exercises [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Afghanistan, Combat necessity, Ose, PTSD, Psychological Trauma, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 15:08:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CactusWren/pseuds/CactusWren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>" ... an event or events that involve actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Criterion A

**Author's Note:**

> The short pieces I post to the KinkMeme are mostly in the nature of finger exercises for writing: just playing around, seeing if I can fill a prompt (usually not in the nature of anything I'd normally write) while remaining true to the characters as I see them and keeping my writing muscles in shape. So I've called this loose assemblage, mostly of prompt fills, the Finger Exercises series.

_**Diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder  
** _

_**Criterion A: stressor**  
_

_The person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which both of the following have been present:_

  1. _The person has experienced, witnessed, or been confronted with an event or events that involve actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others._

  2. _The person's response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror._




 

“The dead man’s preferred associates were mostly small-time crooks: a Michael Wingard, Johanna Ellis, Gilbert Ryan – ”

“W-wait.” Tea slops in the mug in John’s hand. Carefully he puts it down on the kitchen table. “That first name again? Wingard?”

Seated curled at the end of the couch, Sherlock scrolls, clicks. “Michael Wingard, age twenty-eight, born in Portsmouth, incompetent housebreaker. You know him?”

John stops breathing for the briefest moment, then breathes again, slow and steady. “Probably not. Got a picture?”

Keeping his left hand clenched at his side, he reaches with his right for Sherlock’s proferred laptop. Mop of bleached hair, dark Caribbean features – “No. Not him. The Wingard I knew was American, fair, younger. And – ” He shakes his head. “Just a coincidence. Two men with the same name. The Wingard I knew is dead.”

He passes the computer back to Sherlock, who takes it without comment.

But after a moment, without taking his eyes from the screen, Sherlock murmurs, “Killed in action?”

A small, explosive breath. “I won’t even ask. Yeah.”

“And were you hoping to find he was alive, or afraid of it?”

John shrugs. “Hope? No hope, I knew.”

“What happened?”

The question is so simple. Sherlock’s never asked about John’s past, only deduced from what he saw, and then asked for confirmation. John doesn’t _talk_ about what happened to him in Afghanistan. Not ever.

After a moment, John moves to the window. He takes up an uncharacteristic posture, looking out it with his back to the room. His shoulders are straight, his hands clasped behind his back.

“You know,” he says suddenly, without turning, “most people don’t realize how complex a structure the human shoulder really is. Anatomically, I mean.”

“Mm. I suppose not.” _Most things are far more complex than they appear, and I’m looking at one of them now._

“There’s a thing you see in movies and on television – ‘He’s only shot in the shoulder, he’ll be all right.’ As if a bullet can just pass through and not touch anything. But moving at full velocity – if it hits bone, that will shatter the joint completely. That’ll never heal, not the way a clean break in a long bone does. Loss of function and persistent severe pain.

“Or if it misses the joint, there’s a major nerve plexus. Sever that, and you’re left with a dangling arm, no voluntary motion at all. Or of course it can go through the brachial artery. In which case, the story ends right there.”

He stops talking for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is low, less steady.

“There were three of us. Under heavy fire. Me, Corporal Wingard, and Sergeant Kingsley – she was my aide. As good a medic as I ever worked with. We were cut off from the unit, under heavy fire. The shell – ”

He stops. Takes a deep breath, blows it out.

“It was Wingard we’d come after, he already had concussion and flail chest. But the shell, the shrapnel – Kingsley. Everything from ribcage to pelvis, just gone. Everything _but_ the abdominal aorta.”

He swallows. Sherlock feels slightly dizzy, realize he’s holding his breath.

“I was hardly more than bruised. God. I knew I could possibly save one, or lose both. Kingsley was conscious, but not screaming – the endorphins had kicked in. Look up an American footballer named Theismann sometime. She just looked at me. I don’t even know if she recognized me. I – pray she didn’t know her condition.”

His profile is to Sherlock. His face works slightly.

“There was – my kit – I had morphine. This wasn’t triage, I’d done that before – this was a bolus dose, and I smashed the empties to dust. Nobody knows about this. Not my therapist, not my chain of command, not anyone. Even your bastard of a brother doesn’t know.”

His voice, when he goes on, is ragged and hoarse. “After Kingsley was – I had to get Wingard out of there. I hoped I might make it a few hundred yards carrying him. He had no spinal injury, and it was safer than staying where we were. I got him up onto my shoulders. Made it almost to the aid station – ”

His hands have released their clasp on each other. His left hand is against his body, clenched against his chest, his left shoulder hunched forward. His right hand clutches the window frame.

“It feels like – I imagine that’s how being hit by a car must feel. This huge _impact._ I lost balance, and then with Wingard’s weight on my shoulders, my right leg went out from under me. That’s what happened to the leg, by the way – just tried to bend it sideways and tore cartilage. But the bullet – ”

Sherlock has to lean forward to hear him, now.

“The bullet. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. It passed through Wingard’s body, tumbled, lost velocity. Just nicked the bone, did mostly muscle and tendon damage – they made a good job of patching me up.

“But – I went down. He came off my shoulders and I went down. It was only a moment before our men got to us, carried us both out of there. But that moment – _sweet Christ Jesus!”_ The cry detonates out of him, a strangled scream of pain and rage. “I just – _lay_ there, thinking, ‘All this blood, and it’s mine.’ Not thinking about my patient at all. In my head I know, there was nothing to be done for him. Even in a fully equipped trauma centre, he’d have died. But – God, Sherlock, I’m alive _because he died._ It was his body that slowed the bullet. I still have this arm and the use of it, because he died. And Kingsley, that was for nothing.”

Sherlock has never heard such bitterness in a human voice. “And even knowing Wingard was dead before he hit the ground, I can’t help but wonder, what if I’d been able to do something? Something besides lie there _beside my dying patient_ and think, ‘Please, God, let _me_ live’?”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Someone posted the following prompt to the LJKM: "5 diagnostic criteria for PTSD John Watson meets + 1 he doesn't". So far I've only come up with this, but what may lie ahead I know not.
> 
> Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann suffered a comminuted compound fracture of both lower leg bones during a game against the New York Giants, November 18, 1985. He reports that within moments of the injury, which ended his football career, “Almost immediately, from the knee down, all the feeling was gone in my right leg. The endorphins had kicked in, and I was not in pain.”


End file.
